The
now nearly ubiquitous lithium-ion battery is quite possibly one of
the best things ever to happen to portable electronics. Modern
batteries boast good capacities, recharge rates, and charge cycle
lifespans. Unfortunately, this does not preclude them from having a
lifespan at all. And as anyone who has had to replace a laptop
battery or even a cell phone battery knows, they are not
inexpensive.

A
paper published in the ACS journal Nano
Letters by
researchers from Boston College outlines a new material engineered to
replace standard anode materials and performs better than other
recently engineered nanowire structures. Assistant Professor of
Chemistry Dunwei Wang and his team's new anode uses two-dimensional
titanium disilicide (TiSi2)
lattices sprinkled with silicon in a structure that they
call a nanonet.

The nanonet material's charge/discharge
rate was measured to be between five and ten times as fast as
standard carbon-based anode material at 8,400mA/g. It's specific
capacity during these tests was over 1,000mA-h/g, which doesn't place
it ahead of some germanium and silicon anode materials, but firmly
ahead of the previously mentioned carbon. The anode material was also
incredibly durable, losing only .1% capacity per cycle between the
20th and 100th test cycles.

Wang says the nanonet structure is
the key to the durability and speed of the new material. The
structure makes it incredibly resilient, while the conductivity
creates a good environment for the insertion and removal of the
lithium ions. This provides fast recharge times with very little
affect to capacitance over the battery's life.

The team plans
to next examine the effectiveness of nanonet structures for li-ion
battery cathodes.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

I think you have a misconception of how long it takes to get this sort of technology to market. Even if the research on the materials was completed last year there is still a lot of research and development to be done. Studies that are released today could take years to be used in a consumer product (5-20, although it varies).

I'm not saying that any of these specific battery technologies will be in any specific consumer device in any timeframe. Just that's it's unreasonable to expect such a quick turnaround.

We will definitely see improved batteries in the next 5-10 years, the but technology that will be adopted is a mystery at this point.

Moreover, the way we harness electrical power today is so crude, that any breakthrough may be superseded several times by the time it is actually ready for mass production. We have that much ground to cover.

"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." -- Bill Gates